


Yea, Though I Walk

by windsorblue



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003), Firefly
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-11-07
Updated: 2008-11-07
Packaged: 2017-10-11 19:45:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/116243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/windsorblue/pseuds/windsorblue





	Yea, Though I Walk

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Entry tags:**

| 

  
[battlestar galactica](http://postwarmiracles.livejournal.com/tag/battlestar%20galactica), [ficlet](http://postwarmiracles.livejournal.com/tag/ficlet), [firefly](http://postwarmiracles.livejournal.com/tag/firefly), [kara](http://postwarmiracles.livejournal.com/tag/kara), [kinkfest](http://postwarmiracles.livejournal.com/tag/kinkfest), [mal](http://postwarmiracles.livejournal.com/tag/mal), [pg-13](http://postwarmiracles.livejournal.com/tag/pg-13)  
  
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**title:** Yea, Though I Walk  
 **author:** [](http://windsorblue.livejournal.com/profile)[**windsorblue**](http://windsorblue.livejournal.com/)  
 **rating:** PG-13, language  
 **warnings:** possible mild spoilers for the first few episodes of BSG Season 4; post- _Serenity_  
 **prompt:** Crossover: Battlestar Galactica/Firefly - Mal/Kara - dancing with death - "You're several types of crazy, girl."  
 **word count:** 1719  
written for the kinkfest community on eyejay.

 _She remembered floating. Drifting. Falling up through space that wasn't quite space-colored; reds and yellows and lightness where there should have been black. She remembered feeling the Viper fall through space and holding onto the stick like her life depended on it - it probably did - and trying to control the fall before giving up and letting it go. She remembered landing on some nameless hunk of rock, but couldn't remember the descent. She remembered the chill of the air, but couldn't remember the landscape, or getting out of the Viper's cockpit, or why she'd decided to land at all._

 _She remembered thinking that the nameless hunk of rock felt like death; like there had been dying around every corner and behind every tree. She came to the edge of a valley and the feeling became a smell, real and palpable._

\--

"You'd best watch yourself, _bao bay._ You're walkin' on sacred ground."

Starbuck whirled around, weapon-drawing as she did, only to find a weapon drawn on her. The man with the gun was just a few meters away, but the sorrow in the way his shoulders curled made it clear that in his head he was somewhere else entirely.

"You Alliance?" he asked. He was eyeing her uniform as if there wasn't a person wearing it. "If'n you are, you'd best walk away while you still can. I don't much care to shoot a woman, but I ain't completely against it, either."

Her gun never wavered - aim staying true, right between his eyes. "Alliance? What alliance?"

"Your uniform. You're military, ain'tcha? Alliance military?" His head cocked to one side as he looked her over. "Although I reckon I ain't seen your insignia before." He took a half-step forward like he was going to circle around - check her out from all sides - and she cocked her weapon. The sound of the trigger locking made him stop.

"Stay where you are, or I'll blow your fracking brains out."

"Take it easy, now - I'm just meanin' to have a gander at your patch..." A bullet whizzed by his head, missing him by just enough to either scare him or piss him off. He jerked out of harm's way, all the same. "Hey!"

"I said, _stay where you are._ "

He let out a string of what was probably cursing in a language Starbuck didn't understand. "Shootin' at me like that. And here I am tryin' to be cordial and all!"

"You're still fracking breathing, aren't you?"

"Barely!"

"Yeah, well, you shouldn't have moved, and that's as cordial as I get!" At that he muttered something under his breath, again in the language Starbuck didn't know. "What was that?" He repeated it, slower and louder, but she still didn't understand. "What are you speaking?"

He half-sneered at her. "What are you, stupid? Don't they teach Chinese at Alliance schools no more?"

"Look," Starbuck growled, angling herself to show her ship patch. "Colonial Fleet. As in, the ones who are keeping your civvie ass from being toaster bait, motherfracker. I don't know what fracking 'alliance' you're talking about, or what the frack 'chinese' is, so why don't you tell me what you said before I get really fracking pissed off, _asshole._ "

The man stood silent - defiant - for a long moment before he finally said, "I think we got ourselves a failure to communicate, here." Slowly, his eyes on hers, he held out his gun - finger off the trigger - and reholstered it. "I ain't never heard of no 'colonial fleet', and I sure as hell don't know why a toaster would be lookin' for me, seeings how I ain't made of bread. Hell, I don't even remember the last time I ate real bread, so..."

"Not _that_ kind of toaster." Her voice was still testy but her gun arm was relaxing, just a hair. "Toasters. Cylons. You know."

He shrugged. "I don't, actually. What's a cylon?"

"What did you say before?"

He sighed heavily, holding out a hand. "The name's Malcolm Reynolds, thanks for askin', but you can call me Mal; and I said you were a bat-sucking, foul-tempered witch who was several types of crazy. So far, you ain't done much to prove me wrong. Now, why don't you put your weapon away and introduce yourself like civilized folk?"

Starbuck lowered her hand. She stared at the man for a minute, and then holstered her weapon, shook his hand, and told him her name.

\--

 _His eyes were light - blue, maybe. That much, she remembered. His voice, too - she remembered that; the odd twang to it; the funny, unfamiliar lilt. She remembered his eyes and his lilt and the deep brown coat that sat on his shoulders like the weight of the Twelve Colonies. She remembered him telling her the name of the planet they were on - Hera - and that made her laugh now, bitterly, just as it had then._

 _She couldn't remember his laugh, or even if she'd heard it. She couldn't remember his smile or the curve of his jaw. Just his eyes and his voice, and that heavy brown coat._

\--

"Odd place for a person to just turn up. Ain't nobody just turns up here without a reason." Mal was eyeballing her cautiously, like he still didn't trust her, like she'd interrupted his prayers or something. Kara was wondering what or who he prayed for when he came right out and asked it. "What are you doing here?"

Kara shrugged. "Beats me." He wouldn't stop staring her down, so she added, "I was hit. I was in a spin and my canopy was cracked. I was about to hit the eject...I was..." She paused, not looking at him, not meeting his stare. "I was a goner. I should have been dead. And then I was here." When she finally did look at him, she shrugged again and said, "Maybe this is Hell."

Mal turned away from her and said, "It was once. Still is, in my book."

Quietly, Kara looked around. The grass was green where it wasn't burnt, and trees grew here and there. Like the fields of Caprica were, half-a-lifetime ago. It might have been a nice place, once. She sighed loudly and said, "It doesn't look so bad to me. I've seen worse."

"You ain't lookin' at it right," Mal said.

"If it's such a bad place, what are you doing here?"

"Settling some old business."

"Uh-huh," Kara nodded. "Settled yet?"

Mal stood quiet for a long moment, and then he said, "Almost." He turned to look her over, up-and-down again. "You were hit, huh? Your ship, I take it? By one of them cylon things you were talking about?"

"Yep."

"Why'd they attack you?"

Kara's eyebrows shot up, a wry, change-the-subject look crossing her face. "That's a question for the ages." She cocked her head to one side. "Hey, have you ever heard of a planet called Earth?"

"Look up into the sky - there's lots of Earths. Alliance makes new ones all the time. Pick one, or wait around for a new one, if you'd rather."

"No," Kara said, shaking her head. "My people - we're looking for Earth. The real one." She said that last part with a little smile, as if she were joking, but Mal didn't smile back. "We're looking for the people that lived there."

"If you're meaning Earth-That-Was, there ain't no such thing," Mal said. He looked down into the valley, past the edge of the cliff he was standing on, past his toes, down into the ravine. "It's a myth. A bedtime story. Something folks tell their kids about, teach 'em not to waste food and such." He kicked at a pebble, and it skittered down the wall of the ravine below them. "No such thing as Earth-That-Was, but people, we got all over the 'Verse. How come you don't know to call it Earth-That-Was?"

"How come you don't know about the war with the Cylons?"

"I 'spect that's cause you're still several types of crazy, girl, and I myself am a very specific sort of crazy."

"Cute," Kara said, nodding. "Nice." She was pretty sure he was lying about Earth. That he either really believed in it, or that he'd been there himself, so she asked. "Have you ever been there? To Earth?"

He shot her a glance. "Just said there weren't no such thing."

"You're lying. You know where it is."

"I truly don't." But he wouldn't look at her when he said it. He kicked at another pebble and watched it fall, all the way to the valley floor, before he looked up again and let her catch his eye. "Might know someone who does, though."

\--

 _She remembered the girl Mal had brought her to - dark hair, dark eyes, named after water maybe but she couldn't remember - taking her hand and telling her she was lost. She remembered the ship Mal had said was his, and thinking it looked like a type of freighter she'd seen a few times on Caprica, and thinking that was weird and maybe impossible but true all the same._

 _She remembered being able to see what that girl saw, in her mind's eye; a gas giant with rings, a huge red planet, a bright yellow sun, and a little blue world. She remembered that girl telling her the way, and telling her that finding what they sought may not be the same thing as finding what they wanted. And somewhere, deep in her belly, she could feel the way she'd been told to go. Feel it like a lifeline, like a tether being pulled tight._

 _She couldn't remember if she'd kissed him - Mal - but she remembered wondering what kissing him would be like. She remembered the look in his eye when she'd said her goodbyes and her thank-yous and thought maybe he'd wondered about kissing her, too._

 _Space lurched around and over her, curled up on the floor of the cell. Everything in her screamed that they were going the wrong way. And in her ears she could hear the rattling echo of her voice, shouting those words, the sound bouncing back to her off of the walls._

  


 

 


End file.
